Original Mythbuster........

In the mid 'fifties, I had shot a few rattlers, mostly good head shots. An old timer, somewhere around Needles, California, told me it was not good shooting that did in those rattlers, but the fact that the rattler was striking at the incoming bullet that did him in.

In an attempt to debunk this, I got a friend of mine try to make a rattler strike while I took photos. At a shutter speed of 1/300 second, I caught the rattler in mid-strike, frozen in my photo. At a speed of 1/10,000 second, I could not "freeze" the bullet in flight. That speed was the flash duration of my flash unit. My conclusion was that the rattler couldn't react and strike that fast.

Nah, reaction time hadn't even kicked in by the time those snakes were dead, let alone actual muscle movement. It was fine shooting.

I have done special effect photography. You need a shutter speed up around a couple millionths of a second and soem specialized equipment to sync everything up. Here's a link to som work by the guy I learned some of that stuff from. He's a professor of photographic science at RIT. In some of them, the bullet is clearly frozen quite sharply.

Nah, reaction time hadn't even kicked in by the time those snakes were dead, let alone actual muscle movement. It was fine shooting.

I have done special effect photography. You need a shutter speed up around a couple millionths of a second and soem specialized equipment to sync everything up. Here's a link to som work by the guy I learned some of that stuff from. He's a professor of photographic science at RIT. In some of them, the bullet is clearly frozen quite sharply.

I have managed to pin one's head to the ground with an arrow so they are not fast enough to get out of the way of 220 FPS objects. I guarantee it didn't strike at the arrow cause it pierced both upper and lower jaw then stuck in the ground.